Effective Engineering and Blue Point Engineering seem interesting, I need good vendors/sites that help me figure out exactly what pneumatics to buy for animatronic applications. Frightmare has an interesting product too.

First down to Orting to meet up with Adrian and watch some rockets fire. Some crappy weather, I couldn’t stay long enough to see Adrian’s rocket, but we saw lots of other cool rockets.

Lunch at Burger King. They have new chicken tenders in the shapes of stars and lightning bolts. I don’t even want to think about what we were really eating.

Then Paintball at Splat Attack – a great place, nice people. A little hard to find – print out the directions and follow them religiously, and have your windows rolled down so you can hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the guns.

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: InfoSpace founder made insider trades, judge rules

Rob Galbraith DPI: Breeze Systems releases Downloader Pro for Windows – looks like a good tool for photo download from cameras, better than most of the schlock that comes with the cameras.

Way cool – O’Reilly Network: The NoCat Night Light [May 16, 2003]

At Weblogg-ed Vol.2: Using Weblogs in Education, it’s noted from a Pew study that our kids are way ahead of the schools in using the internet – They’re “far ahead of their teachers and principals in taking advantage of online educational resources” - such as weblogs - the report concludes. Boy no kidding, you don’t have to sit around kids long to see how they take to the internet like ducks to water. Their use is more pervasive and deeper than the bulk of educators. I would love to get involved with designing course material that really pushes the kids on their internet use – most of the time, I think the kids are just coasting, they are so far ahead of the school’s expectations in terms of using the net resources.

The Nokia Ngage apparently is bombing with analysts and press. Too bad, I’d love better gaming on my phone. Tho maybe the phone is just a really good voice device and we shouldn’t try to screw it up with other purposes.

I received my new Harmony Remote last night.

This has real promise. Excepting my RCA Scenium DVD/PVR combo, the website knew all my devices. and it had a reasonable guess for the dvd. So getting a working config gen’ed up for my system was quite simple and painless.

The infrared emitter seems to have a nice wide field, I don’t have to be super exact on pointing it towards my stack of gear.

The activity based commands work great so far. When I tell the device I want to watch tv, it turns on my amp, monitor, and dss/tivo box automagically.

The on-remote channel listing and program guide doesn’t seem to be that valuable, i have to play with it more. And I haven’t yet played with all the tivo-specific scenarios – set up a recording, watch something from my hard disk, etc.

But so far I am liking it. And unlike the pronto, I can see my family using this control, they like hard buttons.

Cory Doctorow points to public comments on FCC discussions about some spectrum realloc. I like his description of the Cingular and ATT positions – I think that the contrast between Cingular and AT&T is especially striking here. AT&T is saying, yeah, we’re a telco, this is gonna gore our ox, so we’ve gone out and bought a different ox. Cingular is saying, dammit, that’s our ox, where do you get off goring it?

No time to read now but this paper looks interesting.

We’ve been getting into paintball a little. Just finding a field in the seattle area is tricky. There are a lot of really stale pointers to fields on the web. Splat Attack appears to be the place to play south of town. STP is the place north of town. A “paintball portal” for the northwest is PaintballNW.

For future Halloween consideration – looks like you’ll be able to run MIDI over IP – IEEE P1639 - Distributed MIDI – I’d assume 802.11 would work too. Would be a nice control protocol option, there is lots of MIDI-compatible prop control gear and lighting. And I’d love to be able to use a nice MIDI keyboard as my central control station for Halloween props.

Good site for economic term definitions – Gross National Product (GNP) - Definition. We were confused about the difference between GDP and GNP – now we know!

Looking for good reviews of aftermarket car stereo systems. Car Audio & Electronics Reviews has a lot of ratings (but make sure you have a popup stopper installed, it seems to try to pop a lot). Car Audio Heaven has links to lots of other sites. Car Stereo is kind of a portal with a lot of classifieds. None of the sites seem to have a great database of reviews.